Rediscovering Gandhi
by Suranya Aiyar
October 2, 2024
A Hindi translation of this article will be published in the Media Map issue of October 2024.
The on-going attack in India on the cherished
principles on which we fought our Freedom Struggle forces one to go back to our
history in search of answers. My researches led me to several interesting discoveries,
the most unexpected being the power of Mahatma Gandhi’s own writing.
All my life I had read historians and writers on
Gandhi; I had watched plays and films made by others on him; I had heard my
father and other elders in my circle speak of him, but Gandhi in his own words
was something new for me.
My understanding of Gandhi had been as a leader who
used civil disobedience and non-violent methods of political resistance such as
non-co-operation, strikes, boycotts and public demonstrations to build a
national movement. I saw him as a sort of first-among-equals among the many historical
leaders who led non-violent movements in the 20th century.
But reading Gandhi I realised that this was a lesser
understanding of his life and mission. As I read his weekly editorials, letters,
court statements and interviews I realised that for Gandhi, Satyagraha was much
more than civil resistance, and our Freedom Struggle was much more than about self-rule
or freedom from the British Raj.
Gandhi adopted
the term “Satyagraha” after running a contest in Indian Opinion, his newspaper
in South Africa. The contest was to find a name for what was then his new
movement of protest against unjust colonial laws in that country.
“Satyagraha”
is a combination of two words – “satya” and “agraha”. Gandhi used “satya” in a
number of senses - truth, which is its literal meaning in Hindi and other
Indian languages, but also justice, goodness, and ultimately, love and
humanity. “Agraha” means “to invite”. So Satyagraha was an invitation or appeal
to the truth, to justice, to love. What did this mean?
Gandhi said that those who stood for a cause must endeavour to
persuade their adversaries or opponents of the justice of their case. The idea
of Satyagraha was not to defeat the opponent but to bring them to your side, to
convince them of your position. In Gandhi’s words, “The Satyagrahi's object
is to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.”
And how was this
to be done? Gandhi said that you had to bring about a change of heart in the
adversary. As a corollary this meant the elimination of violence as a weapon of
resistance. Gandhi said that in Satyagraha “the appeal is never to the
wrong-doer’s fear; but must be, always, to his heart.”
For Gandhi, Satyagraha would not
defeat the opponent, but would bring them over, not just to your side, but to
the side of justice. And so, the true climax of Satyagraha, for Gandhi, was the
upliftment of both the opposing sides from a situation of antagonism and
degradation to a mutual celebration of justice. Satyagraha was to compel
recognition from the oppressor “which recognition would not humiliate him, but
would uplift him.” Gandhi said, “it is the acid test of non-violence that in a non-violent conflict there
is no rancour left behind and, in the end, the enemies are converted into
friends.”
In order bring
about this transformation of the enemy, you had to, first, refuse to follow
unjust laws or submit to any unjust situation. Gandhi said that to do so was
the natural right of every citizen. But at the same time, he said you had to
endure without retaliation the punishment, i.e., arrest, lathi charge,
imprisonment and so on, that was bound to follow upon such refusal.
Gandhi believed
that it would be impossible for any regime to carry on if all its citizens
refused to follow their unjust laws and policies, and fearlessly courted jail
or whatever consequences were to follow. But this was not the whole of his idea
of Satyagraha.
Gandhi advocated
courting arrest or facing lathi charge without resistance as an expression of
moral conviction that was bound sooner or later to bring about a change of
heart in the rulers. Gandhi said that
Satyagraha in practice was “dynamic” non-violence. Demonstrating your
resistance by willingly taking upon yourself the punishment for refusing to
obey unjust laws. He called this “self-suffering.” It was Gandhi’s contention
that self-suffering performed with determination and without giving up even on
pain of death, would eventually convince your adversary of the justice of your
cause.
This was much more than an act of
political resistance, it was “the putting of one's whole soul against the will
of the tyrant.” “Working under this law”, said Gandhi, “it is possible for a
single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire, to lay the
foundation for the empire's fall….or, its regeneration.” He also said, “I contemplate a moral opposition to immoralities. I seek
to blunt the edge of the tyrant's sword, not by putting up against it a
sharper-edged weapon, but by the resistance of the soul.”
Unique ideas, expressed in
powerful, succinct writing. The best tribute we can all pay to Gandhi is to
read him. I commend his editorials in Young India and Harijan to all. They
cover the period before the 1920s right up to Independence. Since he wrote
weekly and on the topics of the day, you get a blow-by-blow account of the
Freedom Struggle along with an understanding of how his ideas evolved and his
responses to his detractors and critics.
Since he saw himself as leading a
movement rather than a political campaign, Gandhi wrote openly – changing his
mind, admitting his mistakes and arguing against popular opinion when he did
not believe in it. For me, it was an education in how that simple thing – the truth
- can actually work in public affairs. Gandhi shows us that political leaders do
not need to be airbrushed in how they speak to the public.
All his life Gandhi went before the
public, week after week, warts and all. And the public heard him, and made up
their minds sensibly, eventually designating him the Father of the Nation by
popular consensus. All this was done without spin doctors, algorithms and
publicity managers.
Reading Gandhi, I also learnt that
there is nothing that is being said today against Gandhi or the idea of India
of our Freedom Struggle that was not said in his time directly to him. The fact
that we have been through all of this before is something that I found
reassuring and encouraging.
Gandhi answered his detractors and convinced
the nation of his ideas. His life in politics tells us that Indians can be
persuaded. We are seeing today how Indians can fight each other, but Gandhi
showed us how they can also make up with each other. Gandhi was great but that
is not so important as the fact that we Indians could see and understand his
greatness. That we recognised Gandhi is to our credit and shows how good and
sensible we can be.
As you read Gandhi you will see
that he was an ordinary person like you or me. But he did extraordinary things
on the strength of a quality that we all can and should develop in ourselves.
This was that he did not allow anything to shake him from the belief in the
salvation of India and of all human beings. Truth, goodness and fraternal love
were facts of life for him, like the sun rising every morning or the change of
the seasons.
He showed us that all you need to
uplift your society from a state of conflict and degradation is the conviction that
real goodness is embedded in your fellow men and women, and in your community
and wider society, and that if you can speak firmly but gently then you can
produce “the force which is born of Truth and Love.” As he said, “In a gentle
way, you can shake the world.”
On September 27th, 2024,
I staged, for the third year running, my production of “Gandhi Leela”. This is
a dance drama on the life and ideals of the Mahatma which is written and
directed by me. As an artist the basic approach of Satyagraha takes you to
familiar ground. All art aims to touch the audience’s heart. The purpose of any
work of art is to transform the viewer into a communion of vision with the
artist.
What enabled him to think in terms
of redeeming colonialism rather than simply defeating it. What gave him the
far-sightedness to see that India needed a kind of movement for Independence
that would secure not just her liberty from foreign rule but that would also
form her people into a compassionate and just society that embraced all its
diversities.
After many years of writing,
reading and performing Gandhi, I am beginning to think that it was Gandhi’s
spiritualism that gave him these powerful insights into colonialism and the
things that were needed to be said and done to secure a good future for India.
Spiritual practices undertaken by an intelligent person with sincerity and a
desire for a better understanding of things can have the same inspirational and
transformative effect as the arts.
Indeed, the arts of the Indian
subcontinent have since ancient times been deeply connected with spiritualism.
Many of our finest art forms have come from our temples and sufi khanaqas. This
is the difference between modern art, which seeks to shake the audience and places
the artist centre-stage, and most traditional Eastern arts, which aim to uplift
and transport the audience in a shared experience with the artist of joy,
“ananda”, “raga” or “ranga”. In our arts, it is this shared experience of joy
that is centre-stage, and not the artist or even the work of art in and of
itself.
My attempt in Gandhi Leela is to demonstrate that same idea of transformation and universal upliftment, through our traditional forms of music, dance and drama. For while not all of us can take on the rigours of Gandhian asceticism, we all have the capacity to be moved by the arts. Gandhi too used the arts in speaking to us – as we all experience every time that we hear the strains of ‘Vaishnava Jana To’.
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Online collections of Gandhiji's writing in Young India and Harijan can be found here:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.211536
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.211139
https://archive.org/details/HindSwaraj.YoungIndia.Portal.vol3
https://www.saada.org/source/young-india
https://archive.org/details/HindSwaraj.yi.10973.33464
https://archive.org/details/HindSwaraj.Harijan.vol1
https://archive.org/details/HindSwaraj.Harijan.vol10
https://www.gandhi-manibhavan.org/educational-resources/archives.html
https://www.gandhimuseum.in/gssdl/ebook/display?cat_id=89
Glimpses of Gandhi Leela 2024
Excellent work
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